Generally the task of reconstituting antibiotic or other pharmaceuticals as well as performing fluid transfers from unit drug dose vials is carried out manually. Such work may be performed in a variety of environments such as in a pharmacy or by nursing staff in hospital. Whatever the environment the manual work results in a large amount of technician work load. The resulting labour cost has contributed to the expense of health care.
Typically, in the current procedure, a prescription is received by the pharmacy admixture area. While practice may vary, a pharmacist or other technician may gather all required components, verifying they have not exceeded their shelf life and are the correct constituents, and places them in any tray or container along with the original prescription, in a container which may be a tray made of for example stainless steel or plastic. This tray is placed within a laminar filtered air flow hood. A technician then performs the reconstitution procedure and places the IV bag, the empty drug vial and the original prescription back into the tray. The tray is then checked by another technician where the prescription is again verified against the solute and the empty drug vial and inventory records are updated.
Moreover, the use of sterile conditions when mixing drug doses into solution in IV bags is of prime importance. The fact that the prescription will enter a patient's circulatory system means that any risk of contamination must be eliminated. Such conditions are difficult to achieve and dictate procedures which lengthen the preparation time, increasing unit production cost.